This was news to me, but might me old news to the rest of you. I Came across this article at John Nacks Blog. Apple runs Nativity on 64bit and all applications programed in CoCoa can take advantage of this.

What is 64bit? well it doesn’t mean that your 64bit computer will perform two times faster than a 32bit computer. it really means it has more access to ram. mainly over 4 gigs. so some one using a word predecessor wouldn’t really notice any advantages. But some one opening 200+ RAW photos at 15mb a pop would notice a significant improvement.

General performance gains are some place between 8-12 percent. When Apple announced in there WWDC last June that they would be dropping Carbon 64 a AIP that allowed C, Objective-C and C++ developers to take advantage of Mac OS X-specific features. Any future 64bit applications will have to be remade in CoCoa.

What does this mean for the Photoshop CS4? well it means that the application would have to be reprogrammed and that’s no small feat. John said it would potentially effect over 1 million lines of code. Adobe plans to have a 64bit version of Photoshop ready for CS5. I don’t know if this will mean that current mac users wont upgrade to CS4? or if addressing the over 4 gigs of ram is a big issue for most users and the power users will resist the upgrade?

I don’t see this as a bad thing really. I’m all for improvements and speed and if there are enough reasons to upgrade and suffer a bit of a performance hit then I’m fine with it. This would also give Adobe a chance to scrub out all the old code and create a fresh version of Photoshop. Al tho since there is a learning curve for there engineers this might also mean there will be a few unexpected results.

Its hard to say what will happen, i can only hope that Adobe and pull through and make a more natural product that runs solid on OS X.

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